How to Build Links with a Link Wheel

Inbound links are the most important search engine ranking factor. Great content can pull links naturally, but it’s a common way to do SEO and link building by building forced links using article marketing and various web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages.

Many people do this by linking all those articles and web2.0 pages directly to the “money site”, but it’s more effective to build a link wheel instead, where each article or web2.0 page links to another web2.0 page in addition to the money site and all links are one-way, thus creating a wheel.

Link Wheel? Link Trio?

Instead of just including a link back to my website, I can also add a link to another article I’ve written.

In his post, Glen of Vipershill calls the link wheel a link trio, but it’s the same thing.

Whatever name you use, the fact is that this thing works…

How to build a link wheel

The individual services you use doesn’t matter, but do start building the wheel from a site that allows to easily edit the links, e.g. Squidoo or HubPages. (This example uses the same “relationship blog” and “online dating” example as Glen’s Link Trio post.)

1. (you have your blog / site / page you want to link to, e.g. “relationship blog”)
2. (you have your other blog / site / page, e.g. “online dating”)
3. start with a service where you can add/edit links (to close the wheel in the end), and continue counter-clockwise and build the wheel
4. create a Squidoo lens related to online dating and link it to the online dating blog
5. create article to GoArticles related to online dating, and link to the online dating blog and the Squidoo lens you just created
6. create article to EzineArticle related to relationships, and link to the relationship blog and the Go Articles you just created
7. create Hub Page related to relationships, and link to the EzineArticle article and the relationship blog
8. edit the Squidoo link and add link to the Hub Page

You’ll need to wait in between, if you use article directories like EzineArticles, which take a while to approve each article.

You could grow the wheel by adding more properties instead of closing the wheel at step 8, and you can even leave the wheel open, or “break the wheel” intentionally, but the above is the basic link wheel.

The key is to use different sites on the wheel, e.g. not have two Squidoo lenses or two EzineArticles.

Here’s what it looks like in the end:

Continue growing the wheel by building links to the articles and web2.0 pages. Pat Flynn explains one way to do this in his backlinking strategy.

Take another blog / site / page optimized to another phrase, rinse and repeat.

If you liked this SEO / link building tip, check my blog at http://zemalf.com for more and send me an email using the contact form there, if you have any questions.

 

Interesting experiment on how Google treats the anchor text of a page that uses the rel=canonical tag

Check the full post at SEOmoz: Using Canonical Tag to Get More Than One Anchor Text Value

Remember that messing with the canonical can screw indexing fast, so unless you’re a SEO-pro, I think this falls into the “don’t try this at home (page” category

Amplify’d from www.seomoz.org

Some weeks ago my coworker Leandro Riolino published in our blog an experiment he was working with. The idea of the experiment was to try link to a page A from a page B with 3 different anchor texts providing value of all those anchor texts.

The idea is simple:  we chose 3 random keywords, created an internal page, created 3 links to different URLs that have a canonical tag to the main page. You can see this idea illustrated bellow:

With this small experiment we have a hint on how Google treats the anchor text of a page that uses the rel=canonical tag and now we can try to create some new experiments (eg.: use a parameter in the logo link to your main page, and then receive the anchor text of the second link – because we know that only the first anchor text counts). Read more at www.seomoz.org

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/f1wn

via Amplify.com

Be careful what you read (about SEO)

I’m starting to like the SEO Bullshit -blog more and more. Yes, some posts are ranting for ranting’s sake, bashing the “big guys” (sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes not-so-much), but at least these guys are not afraid to voice out their opinion. Take the advice and be careful what you read (and believe) about SEO…

“Unlocking various SEO ranking signals is about as likely as ranking a site from comment spam links on Matt Cutts blog alone. (…) If it is stated as gospel, with no qualifiers, it’s probably… BULLSHIT.”

- The Art of SEO Bullshit by David Harry (aka theGypsy)

Non-BS SEO info?

I’m a humble scholar of SEO. I know there’s much to learn. And I know I don’t know it all. But I’ve done the research and compiled comprehensive, yet easy-to-understand advice into two articles of mine…

Thus, if you’re looking for good SEO articles to begin search engine optimization for your blog, check out my posts about blog SEO basics and simple blog post SEO. Here are some comments from the posts by the readers:

“How come nobody ever said it so plainly before? Unless you are a techie, most of the articles have been a bunch of gobblely goop.” – Corinne

“Nice to see all the advice in one article!” – Andrew

“Excellent post –really helpful for us “non-techies!”" – Lisa

And other comments like “Great stuff, even the advanced stuff is understandable for a novice.” and “A great post… concise, understandable information on using SEO with your blog post.”.

But we know that people tend to leave positive comments and say “Great post” a lot, so I encourage you to check my posts yourself and tell me what you think:

• How to Make Your Blog SEO Friendly
• Writing SEO Friendly Blog Posts